I’m a Window trading system developer. For the past few years, my daily reality has revolved around low-latency execution engines, orderbook matching, data synchronization, and zero-allocation memory management.
Like many of you, I jumped on ChatGPT on day one. But the funny paradox? In my day-to-day enterprise and finance work, LLMs barely helped. Enterprise security policies, air-gapped systems, and strict IP protection meant 95% of our codebase had to be written and debugged with raw brainpower. An LLM can't debug a nanosecond race condition in an air-gapped trading system that handles real client money.
So, in my spare time, I turned that pent-up engineering energy into open-source. Over the years, I've built at least 5 different production-grade projects related to trading and system architecture. Clean code, comprehensive architecture, real problem-solving.
And that’s when reality hit me in the face.
1. The Internet is Flooded, and Quality No Longer Stands Out
A few years ago, if you spent 6 months meticulously building a robust, high-performance tool, developers would genuinely appreciate the craftsmanship.
Today? The internet is so saturated with thousands of "AI wrapper" apps launched daily that genuine engineering gets lost in the noise. It feels like nobody cares if your architecture is rock-solid. If it doesn't come with flashy marketing or a viral tweet thread, it gets buried under a pile of generic, weekend-hack projects. You put your soul into an engine, and it ends up sitting there with 25 stars on GitHub.
2. The Crab Mentality in Local Tech Communities
What hurts worse than general indifference is the toxic reaction from within my local community in Vietnam.
Instead of fostering a culture of collaboration, there’s an overwhelming "Crab Mentality" (pulling down anyone trying to crawl out of the bucket):
- The "AI can do that" dismissiveness: If you share a deeply optimized module, the immediate knee-jerk reaction from local social feeds is: "Why bother? I could prompt ChatGPT to generate this in 5 minutes." (Spoiler: No, a prompt cannot handle concurrent lock-free data structures reliably under production load).
- Take, close, and rebrand: In open source, we expect people to fork, submit PRs, or discuss improvements. Locally, I’ve seen developers pull the code, wipe the git history, close-source it, and use it for their own commercial gain without a single word of attribution or a simple star.
- Constant gatekeeping & skepticism: Rather than looking at what a tool solves, people obsess over finding microscopic flaws or questioning your motives: "Who are you trying to impress?"
It reached a point where virtually all genuine stars or technical feedback on my repos came from overseas engineers who simply stumbled upon the code and respected the technical merit.
3. How Do We Break Out of This?
I’m writing this not to vent, but because I know I can't be the only one feeling this creative exhaustion. When you realize that:
- Pure engineering quality doesn't automatically earn visibility.
- Your immediate local peers prefer to tear your work down rather than lift it up.
How do you keep the drive to build?
I’d love to hear from developers across the world:
- Is this crab mentality specific to emerging tech scenes, or do you experience the same cynicism in your country?
- In an era of relentless AI-generated noise, how do you get genuine technical work noticed without becoming a full-time marketer?
- For those who broke out of toxic local bubbles: What was your turning point?
Let’s talk in the comments below.
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